Mission Abject
by frooit
Summary: Vincent slash Cloud. It's not really love and it's not really healthy.


**mission abject**

3AM.

Over the Northern Continent.

It's not really love. It's not really healthy, right, accepted, _acceptable_, altogether, or good for either of them. And right off the bat, he's rolling the idea that Cloud's crippled around in his head, that maybe he's incapable of love, of something like it. Say, love's cousin. Say lust. He might know the descriptions, the motions, but otherwise he's standing in the dark, standing with blinders. Open but unseeing (more or less as he is anyway, as he is leaning against the railing here, blank). Vincent knew Lucrecia, knew love, and knows what this is.

"Convenient."

Cloud makes a face that means he doesn't like the description. A funny thing for someone with a limited vocabulary and limited ways of expressing the means to have a vocabulary. Cynical comes to mind. Wary comes to mind. Battle-worn comes to mind. Mentally-scarred comes to mind. His eyes are flecked with Mako and his hands flecked with the red of seeped in blood. Torn clothing, torn skin, and marked, long-traveled boots: a marked life. Cloud smells like metal and hot flesh, sweat, hair damp with it, soaked with it, no way (time) to wash it out. The airship's empty deck smells like cold and wet leather, oiled gears. Cloud's hands are clenching and unclenching, his eyes (the polluted ocean blue, Hojo's poison, Jenova's poison there) are still but focused.

"It's the Mako that makes you..." He felt like being sparing for once.

He seems caught off guard, Cloud. Squeezes his fists shut and leaves them that way. If Cloud's anything, he's honest with what he's feeling right then and there. He can't be blamed for what happened to him in the past. He can't be blamed for Sephiroth. (Vincent on the other hand--leans against the railing harder, cutting a line across his back and tailbone).

"I don't know," Cloud says.

_They touch with the lights dim or off (shaded and secret), without seeing real shapes and faces or the twists of spines. And mostly he feels like he's teaching Cloud something he's missed (because his touches are not without a sense of the unsure, the sense of doubt, creasing his forehead, knitting his eyebrows, making you want to reach and bridge the gap; the invisible one). Vincent's not afraid of intimacy. Cloud's version of human interaction is archaic. But no, he's not exactly crippled. He's not quite broken, though maybe he was once. Broken and left hanging and these are all his pieces left (the peices that Tifa could find)._

"I see," Vincent says.

Something drips from high up in the Highwind's skeleton, snapping to the platform, wet rebound. They don't speak for moments. The word Vincent censored was _edgy _(_twitchy, nervous, paranoid, restless, lost, distraut, uncomfortable, reckless_). Nothing comes without its side effects (note: a miracle Shinra treatment).

"My mother..." Cloud hesitates, frowns, goes on, looking forward out into space (Vincent's seen this look before, and it was called Aeris), "used to say: _everything works out in the end_." He looks back up for this. "Before she died." Milky cool shards from the past.

Vincent leans away from the railing and stands straight, arms crossing, cloth scraping over metal to rest again. This Cloud is tired and deprived of sleep. This Cloud sees the stark edge of his swords more than the sky above. This Cloud wants advice, but on his own terms.

"Who can tell."

_They kiss when it feels right._

_They talk when the pressure's heavy._

_They fuck—and they do, slow—when it's quiet, where Vincent can't see the scar on Cloud's chest, the one inches long and even in diameter, centered for his heart but having missed. So he doesn't know it's from Sephiroth. So he won't ask. So Cloud won't have to tell. He hasn't seen it (just fingers bumping up ribs and there it is, ghosts) because this isn't love. _

Cloud has delusions of being a weak person.

It's not just Vincent listening when it comes to that. It's Tifa (a wildcat, a mother hen, a contradiction), it's Barret (the big brother), it's Nanaki (quiet, loyal, wise but young), Cid (speaking the truth maybe, with excessive expletives), it's even Yuffie, it's even Cait Sith. It's the Northern Crater out there that's making Vincent step away, face the observation deck, the land out there dark and quiet as far as the eye can see. The Planet almost seems at rest (despite the parasites, down, down, deep). They could get unbroken sleep on that thought.

He would sigh, if sighing was something he did. He shifts his footing instead, and listens to Cloud leaving. Never announces his whereabouts with the little things, never sweats the small stuff.

Everything working out in the end depends on Cloud, Vincent's thinking, thinking when he realizes Cloud hasn't left at all, he's only gone down the corridor. Stopped where it begins to wrap around the corner, and there he's looking back, watching, arms at his sides. It's comforting (superficial: the last true comfort Vincent felt was long, long off) and not very comforting at all.

Vincent says, "Good night," and tries not to notice the flinch. _Battle-worn comes to mind._

It's 3AM over the Northern Continent and this really isn't love.


End file.
